Professional networking platform LinkedIn is banking on its second biggest market India to drive innovation and is working on creating localised content specifically for its 35 million Indian members, says the company’s new country manager Akshay Kothari. In an exclusive interview to ET’s Anumeha Chaturvedi, he says that the research and development team at LinkedIn’s Bengaluru centre is behind the platform’s global offerings such as spam checks, and email and mobile notifications. Edited excerpts:

How is LinkedIn faring in terms of user base? The vision for LinkedIn is to create economic opportunities for all professionals and that vision is in line with what the country is trying to do. If we’re able to execute on that well, we can have a massive impact economically and socially. LinkedIn is trying to create the world’s first economic graph and we’re trying to digitally map the world’s economy. There’s a bunch of different nodes. There are skills that you need to get those jobs nodes in the graph. If we’re able to connect them well, we can connect people to opportunities. LinkedIn has 435 million members and India has 35 million members. Our graph is expanding quickly. India had 3.5 million in 2009; it has grown 10 times in seven years. It’s our second biggest market after the US.

How else has India contributed to the platform? LinkedIn India from 2009 to 2012 was a sales organisation selling to customers. In 2012 we built an R&D organisation and have an amazing engineering group building platforms here. Detecting spam, decreasing spam, how we send email notifications are innovations that happened in Bengaluru. Over the last four months we have been trying to build products and features and do customisation to make it work better for Indians. Four months ago, we launched the new mobile app and moved from an email interface to a messaging interface. The number of jobs available on the platform has grown significantly over the last year.

Jio’s Rs 2,399 annual plan offers 2GB per day data that costs effectively Rs 200 per month. It also offers unlimited voice and SMS. Airtel and Vodafone Idea’s Rs 2398 and Rs 2399 annual plans, on the other hand, offer 1.5GB per day data along with unlimited voice and SMS